Archives For Kate DiCamillo

You need to know the rules before you can break the rules.

The teachers in my district have been using an approach to grammar around suggested by Jeff Anderson in his Patterns of Powerbook and lessons. In this approach:

“…students study authentic texts and come to recognize these “patterns of power“—the essential grammar conventions that readers and writers require to make meaning.”

This means that instead of worksheets, students talk about a sentence or two in texts they are reading. They discuss the parts of speech and punctuation. They imitate the sentence(s) and share what they have written.

“This research indicates that emphasis on the presentation of good pieces of writing as models is significantly more useful in the study of grammar” (162).

There is a problem, however. Teaching grammar rules using model sentences from a mentor text is complicated. That is because authors, many of the authors we want students to read, do not follow some of the grammar rules.

You know the rules:

Never start a sentence with “And”, “But”, or “So.”

Use complete sentences only.

But, one does not have to look long to find examples of rule-breaking in many of the grade-level texts.

Coordinating Conjunctions: And, But, So

Looking for mentor texts in the upper elementary grade? The first chapter of Kate DiCamillo’sThe Tiger Rising provides multiple examples of rule-breaking with sentences that begin the trifecta of coordinating conjunctions:

“But only for a minute; he was afraid to look at the tiger for too long, afraid that the tiger would disappear.”

“And he did not think about his mother.”

“So as he waited for the bus under the Kentucky Star sign, and as the first drops of rain fell from the sullen sky, Rob imagined the tiger on top of his suitcase, blinking his golden eyes, sitting proud and strong, unaffected by all the not-thoughts inside straining to come out.”

DiCamillo’s style can prove inconvenient for teachers in 3rd and 4th who are charged with teaching the use of coordinating conjunctions with dependent and independent clauses. How to explain such flagrant violations to students who are held to a different standard?

These teachers must either avoid the subject entirely or find other mentor texts.

The same disdain for a convention is seen in Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time when the character of Calvin explains:

“When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can’t explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn’t happen very often. But I obey it. Andthis afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house” (Ch 2).

The English author/poet Thomas Hardy is equally culpable. His Return of the Native might be offered to high school students in an Advanced Placement Literature class. They might need to defend how Hardy intentionally broke this convention in describing the setting of Egdon Heath:

And Charles Dickens used a ‘So’ to start a sentence in his timeless classic, A Christmas Carol. In this passage, Scrooge waits for the visits that were promised by Jacob Marley.

“When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters. Sohe listened for the hour” (Ch 3).

The flouting of conjunction rules is not limited to fiction. There are examples in literary nonfiction such as Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring. In the New Yorkeressay, a prequel to her book, Carlson employed began sentences with conjunctions, such as:

“There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children, who would be stricken while they were at play, and would die within a few hours. And there was a strange stillness.”

Even Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, a document reviewed and voted upon by a committee breaks the rule. Of the 61 ‘and’s (roughly 4% of the text) in the Declaration, the placement of the last conjunction is what packs the punch:

“— Andfor the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Yes, yes. I know each of these authors broke the “and/but/so” convention to make a point. To contradict. To stress an idea. To break a reader’s rhythm. To startle.

They knew about the rule, and they broke it. Intentionally.

Then why are students not allowed the same choice?
Why might teachers doubt the intent of students as authors?

Use complete sentences only.

Students will also encounter another example of rule-breaking, incomplete sentences or sentence fragments. Incomplete sentences or rhetorical fragments can be found in texts at every grade level that students read in every genre.

The deliberate use of such sentence fragments could be a rhetorical device, such as an Anapodoton: “in which a stand-alone subordinate clause suggests or implies a subject.”

For young readers, Tammi Sauer (Author), Scott Magoon (Illustrator) the picture book Mostly Monsterly (2010) contains both sentence fragments…as well as sentences beginning with “And”:

“It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn’t belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April’s orphans” (143).

As for those familiar texts in high school? In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee fragmented a critical sentence in Atticus Finch’s closing speech:

“She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man”(Ch 20).

F. Scott Fitzgerald also closes The Great Gatsby with an incomplete thought, a fragmented ellipsis, as Nick recalls:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.…And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past“ (180).

There are examples of incomplete sentences used in nonfiction writing as well.

For example, the picture book Moonshot-the Flight of Apollo 11 (grades 2-5) by Brian Floca celebrates the 1969 historic moon landing telling the story in verse. In this text, the sentence fragments contain information in a poetic style:

“Here below
there are men and women
plotting new paths and drawing new plans.

They are sewing suits, assembling ships,
and writing code for computers.

Nuts and bolts, needles and thread,and numbers, numbers, numbers.

Thousands of people for,millions of parts” (6).

For older students, Elie Wiesel’s memoirNight could be read during a study of the Holocaust. In Chapter Three, Wiesel painfully summarizes the last moment he saw his mother and sisters alive in the Auschwitz camp in a sentence fragment:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!” Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words.”

Advanced Placement Language and Composition students might note the liberal use of sentence fragments in essays, like the ones in the opening of award-winning sports columnist Rick Reilly’s article Sis! Boom! Bah! Humbug! published in Sports Illustrated (10/18/1999)

“Every Friday night on America’s high school football fields,
it’s the same old story. Broken bones. Senseless violence.Clashing egos.

Not the players. The cheerleaders.”

Okay. Again? Yes. I know.

A writer gets to break the rules. But when is that permission given to our student writers?

The English Journal: NCTE

Of course, teachers want to have students express themselves and develop a voice. An article Edgar H. Schuster wrote for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) English JournalA Fresh Look at Sentence Fragments (5/2006) argues that some rules, such as no incomplete sentences, may discourage students from developing their voice or taking risks in their writing style. His research led him to counter grammar rules by saying:

Native speakers of English have “intuitive knowledge” of what makes a sentence.

Students often break the rules before they learn them; breaking rules may be a stage in learning them.

How do teachers understand how a student knows “the rules”…or not?

Schuster cites another researcher, Rei R. Noguchi, who suggested that the kinds of fragments students write reveal that they understand syntax.

For example, Schuster offers a reflection by an eleventh-grader who opened her essay,

According to Schuster, this student writer “was thinking in terms of effectiveness rather than grammar.”

He further argues that if such an example of a fragment is rhetorically effective, then how can the teacher applaud or rate some students—those who “know the rules”—and then penalize others?

Reliable Grammar rules

Instead of a list of ‘Don’ts’, the discussions teachers have with students in writing conferences about grammar rules may be more effective. This is what can happen when teachers use the mentor sentences and the format of Anderson’s Patterns of Power. At every grade level, students can identify the grammatical concept (ex: use of conjunctions), compare that concept, and then imitate that concept. They may imitate by starting a sentence with a conjunction or by creating a sentence fragment.

These discussions also allow students the chance to explain how an author’s choice impacts the reader’s understanding. In short, the goal is for more discussion about an author’s grammatical choices rather than a stack of worksheets that reinforce grammar rules that real authors do not follow.

What better way to start the National Day of Writing than by writing a blog post while traveling on a train to a Teachers College Reading and Writing Project 95th Saturday Reunion in NYC?
In a few hours, the writer Kate DiCamillo will give the morning keynote address titled “Home Again- Finding Our Way Through Stories.” I have written about Kate before, and I have admired her ability to combine unusual elements in a story, for example, a squirrel, a vacuum, and poetry in her Newbery winning children’s book Flora and Ulysses.
In triangulating three such different elements, DiCamillo did have to find a way through her story exactly the way the preposition through is defined:

“moving in one side and going out the other side of”

Reading through a story means moving into one side of the story -its setting, conflict, and character’s point-of-view, and going out the other see of the story arc and resolution of conflict. Reading “through” a story is enjoyable.
Getting “through” a story is not as pleasurable.
Yet, I often hear the phrase, “have to get through” as if through means having to endure or having to struggle or trudge.
I have been guilty in the past of stating how I have to get “through” a literature unit, feeling like I am dragging students “through” a novel, a test of their endurance and of mine. Now, when I hear teachers expressing a desire to get “through” a unit, I cringe.

I am certain no author intended that experience for the reader.

What an author wants is what is expressed by readers who are engaging in The Great American Read.
I have been following The Great American Read, an 18-part-series on PBS that features 100 of the best-loved novels read in America as rated in a national survey (see checklist).
These novels represent many different genres and are not limited to novels written by American (a point of contention for the misnomer “America’s novel”)
This is a book popularity contest, and anyone can vote daily on their choice of book. The television episodes feature interviews with readers including some celebrities or literary critics.
(Full disclosure: I vote regularly for E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.)
What I am struck by, is the number of people who begin to discuss a favorite book by saying, “I must have read this book…” and then proceed to give a number: a dozen times, 25 times, even 100 times.
These readers are not trying to “get through” a novel;. They are wallowing, lingering, and finding something new in their rereads. Their “through” experience is one worth repeating.
Of course, this means that those teachers who discourage students from rereading a book should take note and reconsider. In The Great American Read, the practice of rereading a favorite novel is celebrated.The Great American Read concludes this coming week (10/23/18) when the number one book will be announced. Selecting a “winner” by popular acclaim will certainly disappoint some viewers who will have, as Kate’s speech promises, found their way through a story.
Which means (as I approach NYC) that I have also triangulated on this National Day of Writing: the preposition “through,” The Great American Read, and Kate DiCamillo.
That is the answer to the question in the hashtag #whyIwrite ?
I write to make connections.
Happy National Day of Writing, 2018!

Kate DiCamillo stood in the nave of Riverside Cathedral, her curly hair barely visible over the podium, her voice clear and strong as she delivered the keynote address for the 85th Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project Reunion (October 19, 2013).

She was exactly as advertised from the information on her website, “I am short. And loud.”

She addressed the packed house of literacy teachers, some 2000 strong, who knew her as the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (a Newbery Honor book), The Tiger Rising (a National Book Award finalist), and The Tale of Despereaux (winner of the 2003 Newbery Medal), but her morning speech was about her latest book, Flora and Ulysses. She set the stage with her opening proclamation:

“This story begins as stories often do with a vacuum cleaner.”

Not just any vacuum cleaner. The vacuum at the center of this story was a 1952 tank Electrolux 2000, a treasured appliance belonging to DiCamillo’s mother. How treasured? DiCamillo joked that when her mother who was ill moved to be with her in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she worried more about the safe delivery of the Electrolux to the new home more than her own personal safety.”I want you to know that you can have the Electrolux when I am gone,” her mother told her. “It’s a really good vacuum cleaner,” she said and added, “The cord is extra long…and its retractable.”

The audience of teachers laughed; DiCamillo’s dry delivery in describing her mother’s attachment to a housecleaning appliance was part retrospective for the older teachers and part kitsch for the newer ones. “Remember the Hoover?” DiCamillo quoted her mother as saying, “that Hoover was useless!” But as she recounted how her mother’s illness progressed, the appreciation for this appliance took on new significance. “I really hope you will take the Electrolux,” her mother told her, “that makes me feel better.” So when her mother passed way, DiCamillo did take the Electrolux, but put it in the garage through that winter.

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call Life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.”

She reflected that when her mother was dying, she had held her mother’s hand in comfort, an action profoundly different from all the ways her mother had taken her hand when she was younger. The crowd was visibly moved by this retelling of the loss of her mother, but in typical DiCamillo storytelling fashion, her speech then veered off to include the death of a squirrel.

Shifting from the pathos for her mother, DiCamillo recounted that one day, a dying squirrel had chosen the front steps of her home as the last stop on his final journey. His eyes were open, yet unseeing; his chest dramatically heaving with his last breaths.
“I didn’t want him to suffer and die on my front steps,” she bemoaned.
So, she called a friend.
“‘There’s a squirrel on my front steps…He’s dying’,” she told her friend (Carla), “‘what should I do?'”
The advice she received from her gentle and humane friend appalled her.
“‘Do you have a shovel…and a tee shirt?'” asked Carla.
DiCamillo admitted that she had a shovel, but that she “moved away from the front door so the squirrel would not hear what was being said.”
“‘Put the tee shirt over the squirrel, and I will come over and hit him with the shovel,’ replied Carla.”

Fortunately, before that plan could be executed, the squirrel had crawled away.
“He may have heard us, or he had moved to get away from my presence,” said DiCamillo. The same people who had been tearing up from from the death of her mother and the power of the Rilke poem were now laughing out loud; the cathartic shift in emotions had been seamless.

DiCamillo then told the audience that she considered her reaction to the dying squirrel was not unlike the reaction of E.B.White in an essay he published in The Atlantic, “The Death of a Pig”:

“He came out of the house to die. When I went down, before going to bed, he lay stretched in the yard a few feet from the door. I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there: his face had a mild look, expressive neither of deep peace nor of deep suffering, although I think he had suffered a good deal. I went back up to the house and to bed, and cried internally – deep hemorrhagic intears.”

“White claimed that his novel Charlotte’s Web was not connected to this essay…but could this event,” DiCamillo speculated, “have been more?”
She paused to consider their mutual despair over loss.
“He wanted to keep the pig alive….I wanted to keep the squirrel alive.”

And in that instant, a cathedral full of teachers understood that great ideas do not happen in (pardon the pun) a vacuum. DiCamillo’s speech illustrated how the three seemingly unconnected elements in her keynote address were the elements of story she combined in her latest book Flora and Ulysses.

In this story, there is a vacuum, a squirrel, a shovel, and several lines of the Rilke poem.
To be more specific, there is the near death experience of the squirrel, mistakenly sucked up by the Ulysses 2000; there is a comic-book superhero aficionado who intervenes; and there are several drafts of meta-physical squirrel poetry. The story has the “beauty and terror” from the Rilke poem as well as the giving of a hand for comfort. There are what DiCamillo terms, “eccentric, endearing characters” presented in a format that combines print with comic book styled illustrations. Like the keynote address, the novel plucks at both the heart and the funny bone; it is a wonderful story.

The biography on DiCamillo’s website reads, “I write for both children and adults, and I like to think of myself as a storyteller.” Listening to her speak, I cannot think of her as anything else.